Re: The Common File Format will be a UV Game Changer
An excellent analysis, however, let me give another perspective.
At my job at a digital media agency, I worked with the DECE on the early beta version of the UltraViolet service, my job was to try to untangle the complex rules of the platform into something that was approaching usable in the form of uvvu.com. I stopped working on the project in early 2012, but for almost 2 years, I was exposed to the deepest levels of discussions about policy, process, technology and more that goes into UltraViolet.
The central thesis of UltraViolet - the interoperable, multi-DRM compatible "Common File Format" - that you could "download once, and play anywhere" was often called the "DVD of the Internet" by DECE backers, but I think that this was interpreted in different ways by different people. For technologists, it meant an interoperable file object that was independent of retailer or CE maker. For content owners it meant a high-margin sale of a media product. Both of these views, as it turns out, were wrong. In 2008, the same year that the DECE formed, streaming access to media simply exploded in popularity - and with this the consumers perception of content as a product began to wane, and content as a service became ascendant. By 2010, shortly before UltraViolet launched at CES, there was a change to legal policy at the DECE, it made streaming of content a requirement of the seller for one year after the sale. Streaming became far more important than downloading for the consumer than the DECE expected. Originally, the idea was that you'd have a subscription streaming service or an add-on to your cable bill where you'd pay a monthly fee to stream your collection of licensed media. Sony's Mitch Singer, one of the founders of the DECE, has said in multiple public interviews that streaming was envisioned to be like the ATM networks for banks, where you pay a fee to access your money, you'd pay a fee to access your movies. I have sat with Mitch and talked many times and in some ways I agreed with him, but I always favored a bundled service with a monthly fee that stored and played your movies as well as offering other movies and music for "free" (like Vudu, but with a monthly fee to cover unlimited access to "non-premium" content) and maybe some other media subscriptions.
But back to the CFF and the central premise of UltraViolet. In the years since UltraViolet launched, two things have happened. First, offline is the exception. Yes, some people spend lots of time in planes and on trains where bandwidth is absent or not streaming-friendly, but most people don't. So the need to have a local copy of media is less and less important. Secondly, media access via vendor-specific apps is perfectly acceptable to consumers (Spotify, Pandora, Kindle, Netflix, Vudu) and while it sucks for the seller to have to create and maintain a fleet of device applications, for the consumer, it's actually a pretty neat situation - you install an app, and it plays your content. Apps can handle the ugliness of downloading and managing media content and licenses for you (iTunes, Amazon & Spotify do this particularly well) and while grumbling about having to download unique binaries for 4 devices is somewhat legitimate, the reality is that bandwidth is increasingly "uncapped" for land-line/wifi systems, and for mobile devices, super-compressed versions seem to be perfectly acceptable and don't impact data limits much. Yes, yes, "quality" and all that. I think the videophile complaints about streaming quality have been subsumed by market realities: most people don't actually care about picture quality. So in short - maybe downloads don't matter much anymore. Certainly file systems don't matter in the mobile ecosystem - Steve Jobs was very correct when he said that most people don't want to manage files. So the file object as a unit of importance to the consumer has been subsumed.
The CFF has been "on the horizon" for a very long time now, and although I have zero regular contact with the DECE anymore, I do monitor what they are doing and from where I sit as an ex-insider, I can imagine that the testing process (which is happening now) is going slowly and there is an abundance of caution needed to ensure that ineroperability actually happens. We're talking about epic complexity here, multiple DRM's, multiple device registration schemes and so on. If they manage to get it to work (and I have no reason to think they won't) I fear that the CFF may arrive on the market much in the same way that color fax machines did - a big improvement over the old, but still mostly irrelevant except for a few corner-cases and geographies.
An excellent analysis, however, let me give another perspective.
At my job at a digital media agency, I worked with the DECE on the early beta version of the UltraViolet service, my job was to try to untangle the complex rules of the platform into something that was approaching usable in the form of uvvu.com. I stopped working on the project in early 2012, but for almost 2 years, I was exposed to the deepest levels of discussions about policy, process, technology and more that goes into UltraViolet.
The central thesis of UltraViolet - the interoperable, multi-DRM compatible "Common File Format" - that you could "download once, and play anywhere" was often called the "DVD of the Internet" by DECE backers, but I think that this was interpreted in different ways by different people. For technologists, it meant an interoperable file object that was independent of retailer or CE maker. For content owners it meant a high-margin sale of a media product. Both of these views, as it turns out, were wrong. In 2008, the same year that the DECE formed, streaming access to media simply exploded in popularity - and with this the consumers perception of content as a product began to wane, and content as a service became ascendant. By 2010, shortly before UltraViolet launched at CES, there was a change to legal policy at the DECE, it made streaming of content a requirement of the seller for one year after the sale. Streaming became far more important than downloading for the consumer than the DECE expected. Originally, the idea was that you'd have a subscription streaming service or an add-on to your cable bill where you'd pay a monthly fee to stream your collection of licensed media. Sony's Mitch Singer, one of the founders of the DECE, has said in multiple public interviews that streaming was envisioned to be like the ATM networks for banks, where you pay a fee to access your money, you'd pay a fee to access your movies. I have sat with Mitch and talked many times and in some ways I agreed with him, but I always favored a bundled service with a monthly fee that stored and played your movies as well as offering other movies and music for "free" (like Vudu, but with a monthly fee to cover unlimited access to "non-premium" content) and maybe some other media subscriptions.
But back to the CFF and the central premise of UltraViolet. In the years since UltraViolet launched, two things have happened. First, offline is the exception. Yes, some people spend lots of time in planes and on trains where bandwidth is absent or not streaming-friendly, but most people don't. So the need to have a local copy of media is less and less important. Secondly, media access via vendor-specific apps is perfectly acceptable to consumers (Spotify, Pandora, Kindle, Netflix, Vudu) and while it sucks for the seller to have to create and maintain a fleet of device applications, for the consumer, it's actually a pretty neat situation - you install an app, and it plays your content. Apps can handle the ugliness of downloading and managing media content and licenses for you (iTunes, Amazon & Spotify do this particularly well) and while grumbling about having to download unique binaries for 4 devices is somewhat legitimate, the reality is that bandwidth is increasingly "uncapped" for land-line/wifi systems, and for mobile devices, super-compressed versions seem to be perfectly acceptable and don't impact data limits much. Yes, yes, "quality" and all that. I think the videophile complaints about streaming quality have been subsumed by market realities: most people don't actually care about picture quality. So in short - maybe downloads don't matter much anymore. Certainly file systems don't matter in the mobile ecosystem - Steve Jobs was very correct when he said that most people don't want to manage files. So the file object as a unit of importance to the consumer has been subsumed.
The CFF has been "on the horizon" for a very long time now, and although I have zero regular contact with the DECE anymore, I do monitor what they are doing and from where I sit as an ex-insider, I can imagine that the testing process (which is happening now) is going slowly and there is an abundance of caution needed to ensure that ineroperability actually happens. We're talking about epic complexity here, multiple DRM's, multiple device registration schemes and so on. If they manage to get it to work (and I have no reason to think they won't) I fear that the CFF may arrive on the market much in the same way that color fax machines did - a big improvement over the old, but still mostly irrelevant except for a few corner-cases and geographies.
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